you and Jerry.”
“But if he strikes around blind for the trail and doesn’t find it,” said Ronicky, “he might start straight for Cosslett’s, and then we’d simply be running into the trap. Besides, maybe he guesses that you know something.”
“He guesses that Whitwell knew something, and that Whitwell told me. What it is, he can’t guess. But if he’s at Cosslett’s—then that’s fate. And if fate’s agin’ us, well be beat any way we look at it. But we won’t be beat, son. I feel lucky! We can get to Cosslett’s inside of two hours of hard riding. And Moon ain’t apt to get there as quick as that. Then a look under the veranda—”
“But what if somebody else has looked there in the last ten years?”
“Not a chance. That veranda was built close to the ground. If Whitwell put it there, he must have put it there because he knew nobody’d look there.”
“Then, Hugh, well start.”
“Yes. Jerry has rested enough by this time!”
VIII. AT COSSLETT’S CABIN
It seemed to Ronicky that there was more than an ordinary admixture of superstition in the nature of Hugh Dawn. If fate aided him, he would get Cosslett’s gold. If fate were against him, he would get death instead. So he went ahead blindly trusting in luck. He had made only one sensible provision to meet danger, and that was enlisting the aid of another man, Ronicky himself. The more Ronicky thought of the affair, the more of a wild-goose chase it seemed to him.
Yet he knew that it was madness to attempt to dissuade Hugh Dawn, and he dared not let the big fellow go on with his daughter to face Moon. And face the outlaw chief he knew they would, before the adventure was finished.
Returning to the cabin, they found Geraldine Dawn already up, and they found, moreover, that she had reached the conclusion to which they had already come. She dared not go back and live alone in the big house of her father; a thousand times she would rather continue the trip and face whatever lay before them, than make the return.
Only one thing upset her—what would the people of Trainor say when she did not appear to teach the school? But there was, in the village, a girl who had substituted for her once before during an illness. Therefore the classes would be taken care of. With that scruple cared for—how slight a thing it seemed to Ronicky Doone!—she was ready to face the adventure.
They started on within a few minutes, swerving now to the left and striking through rougher mountain trails. Hugh Dawn had correctly estimated the distance. In the early evening they came upon Cosslett’s cabin.
It stood in an imposing place on the cliff above Cunningham Lake. On all sides the ground sloped back. There were no trees near, though in all other directions the forest stepped down from the mountaintops to the very edge of the lake.
“You see?” exclaimed Hugh Dawn. “The old boy picked a place where he could look on all sides of him. He wouldn’t trust a forest where gents could sneak up on him.”
Ronicky smiled to himself. Such reasoning simply proved that Dawn had already convinced himself, and was willing to pick up minute circumstances and weave them into the train of proof.
They climbed the slope and found that ten years had dealt hard with the little house. The roof was smashed in. The sides caved out, as though the pressure of time were overcoming them. But the first place to which they ran, the veranda, showed no opening beneath its floor and the ground.
Hugh Dawn looked at it in despair. The ground, indeed, was flush with the top of the flooring.
“I must of remembered wrong,” he muttered, “but it seems to me that in the old days they used to be a space between the floor and the hill. I dunno how this come!”
Ronicky had been surveying the site carefully.
“Maybe the house had settled,” he suggested. “We’ll tear up the boards and see.”
It was easily done. The rotted wood gave readily around the nail-heads, and in a minute or two every board had been torn up. But they saw beneath no sign of such a thing as a forty-pound iron chest. Hugh Dawn was in despair.
“Maybe somebody else has lived here and found it and—”
He could not complete the sentence, so great was his disappointment. Ronicky, expecting nothing at all, was quite unperturbed. He looked at Jerry Dawn. She was as calm as he, but something of pity was in her eyes as she looked to her father. Was it possible that she, too, saw through the whole hoax and had simply undertaken the ride to appease the hungry eagerness of her father?
“We’ll go inside,” she suggested.
They entered the cabin through the front doorway, stepping over the door itself, which had fallen on the inside. All within was at the point of disintegration. The cast-iron stove was now a red, rusted heap in a corner. The falling of a rafter had smashed the bunk where it was built against the wall. The boards of the floor gave and creaked beneath their steps. In the corners were little yellowed heaps of paper—old letters, they seemed. And on the floor beneath the bunk Jerry Dawn found, face down, and yet with every page intact, the Bible which was always mentioned whenever the name of Cosslett was brought into conversation.
When she raised the book, it seemed that she raised the ghost of the old white-bearded hermit at the same time. In spite of the ruin, the terrible scene rushed back upon the memory of each of the three—Jack Moon and his men tumbling through the door—the two explosions of guns—the hurling of the casket through the window—the fall of the hermit.
Suddenly Hugh Dawn shouted in alarm. Making a careless step with his great weight, he had driven his foot crashing and rending through the flooring where rain had rotted away the wood except for a mere shell. He scrambled out of his trap, half laughing and half alarmed.
“The old gent had a cellar,” said Ronicky, “judging by the way your leg went through that floor.”
Jerry Dawn looked up from the Bible, whose yellowed, time-stained leaves she had been turning with reverent fingers. The awe went out of her eyes, and bright interest came in its place.
“A cellar?” she asked. “Then let’s look at it. Perhaps that’s the place where he hid all the gold, dad?”
Her father snorted.
“Are you trying to make a joke out of this?” he asked heavily. “Hide the gold in the cellar! Hide fifteen or twenty million dollars’ worth of gold in a cellar!”
“Twenty millions?” gasped Ronicky, beginning to fear for the sanity of his companion. “Are you serious about that, Dawn?”
“Why not? The band must of took a clean forty millions, and out of everything that they took, that old hawk, according to Hampden, got fifty per cent. He was a business man, right enough! And what’s half of forty? Twenty millions, boy!”
That hungry glittering came into his glance again, and Ronicky shook his head.
“But we’ll see about the cellar.” He nodded to
